Unearthing the Primitive Artist Within

On the surface, my work may appear to be all birds, bugs and fish and I myself a sort of idiot - in love with all creation, gone feral embracing the trees and posies.  Yet my drawings - the webs of fiercely wrought bones and branches, vulvas of fruit, fragile skeletons and stamens, serpents and luna moths gliding through nocturnal mazes etched into copper - are not just a fool’s scrawls of a sentimentally viewed nature. My ulterior motive, if it can indeed be called that, is to reflect a reality far more complex than anyone’s capacity to delimit, categorize, catalog or define it with a distant and cold-eyed intellectual rigor.

Instead I am called to close the distance, get involved. Up close. Very close - intimate with what I am examining. I am called to be clear-eyed and to submit myself to the arduous discipline of an ancient craft; this call originates in the self-same supernatural psychic space under whose influence the primal cave artist descended underground to conjure up and reconfigure reality. Am I then a naked primitive responding to primal urges or a modern intellectual clothed in a seamless and philosophically consistent garment? Or am I a hybrid, perhaps a mutant or even a misfit? Where do I fit in?

As a 26 year old graduate student in zoology, back in 1978, I had not yet faced up to my true vocation; instead, I attempted to adapt and accommodate and waltz gracefully through the elaborate and somewhat twisted dance of meeting societal, familial and self-imposed expectations.  Even as I sensed the writing on the wall - as threatening as it was alluring - I was still afraid to cast my lot with something so insecure and unstructured as being an artist: no external directives; no guarantees of financial security; and artists – they’re unstable, aren’t they?  They go off the deep end, chop off an ear, or worse, when in a fit of dopamine deprivation they open a scandalous exhibition, incur debt and bring shame upon their families. Freedom is a daunting proposition, is it not? No, I still preferred to wear the disguise of a graduate student in Zoology, while leading a secret life as an artist.

As it turns out, this was a secret I had kept mostly just from myself, while everyone around me wondered why I punished myself with conflicted separate identities.  My mother had known for years where it was all heading; serenely, she waited for the moment I would finally come out of my self-inflicted daze and accept my calling. Fellow students from the fisheries and wildlife departments would apprehend me in some dark corner, drawing with a passion that was unmatched in my scientific research; even my lab partners in the zoology department began to buy my drawings, hinting around about the impending disposal of my library - my expensive reference books on statistics, embryology, ecology and physiology - which I would no longer need when I finally came out of the closet.  I was metamorphosing inside a chrysalis that was translucent, the brand of artist on my forehead – scarlet - there for all to see. 

At Colorado State University, bound to be a dutiful son both to my father - the biochemist and cancer researcher, and not a quitter - and to my mother - the linguist and classics scholar - I was going to snag that degree, come what may, and do it with enough publications to overcompensate for all my real and imagined inadequacies.  I was going to do it well and be a humanities scholar, too, and even keep up with my languages.

I haunted the library - ostensibly to stay abreast of the scientific journals in my field; I tried to read the foreign journals in German and Russian, but I kept running afoul of the specialized technical language, enough so that I ended up mostly just reading the abstracts.  (I could also see that I was the only one to ever open these publications).  They were indecipherable, and I put them aside to look at Art Forum – which I ultimately found as unreadable as the Cyrillic confabulations of political rhetoric masquerading as Russian science.

On these covert expeditions into the academic art world I found that it was fracturing itself, philosophically, into ever-smaller movements and schisms and cults as the art theorists lobbed their incomprehensible manifestos and the minutiae of obscure but damning points of doctrine at each other. On the one hand, the world of art appeared to be excitedly expanding, while on the other hand it seemed to be also imploding: the blood-letting was as profuse and senseless as that occurring in any sub-sect of a fundamentalist church. (The art critics were on the same page with me all right – schizoid). I had been contemplating jumping ship to join the forces of art - for all that is good and moral - but these doctrinal disputes had me buffaloed: Was I expected to embrace this falderol - perhaps take sides and fight the good fight for ex-post modern something or other?  Couldn’t I just draw beautiful pictures and still be deemed adequately contemporary as an artist to pass muster among colleagues?

Furtively devouring the art journals, and clandestinely drawing, I also continued to shoulder the science lab and coursework - racing madly to stay in place (but racing with a foot in each cage) like the lab-rat in a treadmill. But I did finally glimpse a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel: somewhere among the stacks and tomes I stumbled upon Campbell and Jung warming themselves at the fire of myth and archetype. The idea of a collective unconscious, of powerful primal images that arise unbidden from the murky depths, of universal visions that cross cultural barriers – it all caught my imagination - electrified me.  I recognized what they were getting at, and I desired to get at it too.

I stalked museums, kept my hand limber drawing, and, occasionally, I would receive an urgent signal or a veiled sign – an omen intimating my eventual calling.

Scientific fieldwork took me into the front range of the Rocky Mountains. High in the arid rain shadow of the eastern Rockies I discovered extraordinary old rocky mountain junipers. I spent hours sitting among them, absorbing their breathtaking contortions and convolutions as they engraved themselves into my neuro-cortex. Back in my apartment I obsessively drew imaginary junipers late into the night. I kept one of these juniper drawings on my desktop for years; it served to remind me of my calling – who I was and why I was here. A decade later, my wife Jana and I were exploring the legendary energy vortices and power spots encircling Sedona, Arizona. At day’s end we ascended through the red rocks and rabbit brush of Airport Mesa to pray, the profound calm propelling us into a deep meditative state. Resurfacing, I opened my eyes and there in front of me, lit up in the last rays of the setting sun, I beheld my juniper - the very tree I had drawn a decade earlier in Colorado from my imagination: This was without a doubt one of those postcards from the other side, sent to awaken us from time to time. I reached for my camera and later, when I compared the two - the snapshot and the drawing (that’s the scientist in me, the doubting Thomas who demands incontrovertible, palpable evidence), the two coincided remarkably. Except for one curious detail: the drawing was a mirror image of the photo.  My invented juniper not only materialized, but it had been a foreshadowing of things to come, because, as all printmakers know - the metal plate (or wood or linoleum-block) into which we etch and carve our images, when inked and printed on paper, will duplicate the image – but reversed – as if looking into a mirror.

But I was still a zoology student, collecting bird eggs and mining my data for meaning - data that had assumed a vertiginous complexity conducive to little else but computerized number crunching. Imagine an abstract space with twenty mutually orthogonal dimensions; start by plotting a graph in two dimensions and you have a simple line or curve on a page.  Plot the data in three dimensions, and you are plotting a line through a cloud of insects, finding the line that is mathematically closest to every single bug.  Now, define that mathematically and make the space into one with ten or twenty axes in an abstract space and the cloud of points or bugs becomes an incomprehensible mass of something which can be defined and calculated, if not visualized. Such elegant constructs and it’s all just statistics – the supposedly dull and plodding science. Now imagine what can be done with current computers to model complete ecosystems with all the atmospheric variables plugged in: temperature, rainfall, wind and transpiration rates of different plants and soil types and on and on.  Imagine borrowing all the off-line computers that kindred spirits might make available (as has been done with the SETTI project), and scanning unimaginable volumes of radio waves coming in from outer space for patterns - or with the various genome projects, to simply create theoretical protein structures in cyberspace in endless permutations, looking for configurations of atoms that will create useful long-chain molecules.    

1979 was truly an exciting time to be an ecologist. The discipline was just finding its form as a real science, evolving from a fertile mix of related disciplines into something cross-disciplinary, new and intellectually stimulating - something with the raw energy and aggressive vigor of a hybrid.  Fisheries and wildlife departments were mixing it up with foresters and zoologists; botanists consulted statisticians and mammologists; aging professors of horticulture were seen sitting in on classes with undergrads to learn about integrals and computer programming.   The isolated fiefdoms of specialists were falling left and right as their doors were pried open, one by one, and new ideas were being born – powerful new ideas with practical applications in the preservation of all the forests and wildlife so dear to my heart. 

Nonetheless, I grew uneasy. My thesis work involved studying the development of bird eggs through incubation.  Climbing trees and wading around in marshes collecting them was great, but then I had to come into the lab at all hours and, like a mother hen, turn the incubating eggs in their boxes. I needed to control for temperature and ambient humidity and conscientiously weigh each egg at precise intervals.  I plotted regression analyses, which would tell me about diffusion rates of gases across the eggshell – the shell itself being mined by the evolving embryo for minerals, and thinning at logrhymic rates.  I could describe physiological adaptations to altitude as a result of these studies and publish the work in journals read by a handful of colleagues.  All interesting enough, but there were a lot of long nights spent pondering the racks of tiny round yellow warbler eggs, song sparrow eggs ringed with crowns of delicate brown spots, long narrow and brittle barn swallow eggs, blue and black swirled redwing eggs, tough round little cowbird eggs and nearly conical common tern eggs.  It grew to be disturbing: all the pretty birds stillborn, never to perch on a telephone wire or sing from a cattail.  As a bird lover, I was killing birds. In entomology classes I filled up box after box with pinned insect specimens.  In botany class I stuffed plant-presses with dying flowers. As an ichthyologist, I sampled streams to understand predator/prey dynamics of the many fish species, and then jammed jars with formalin soaked specimens. One day, staring at the corpses of red-nosed dace, hogsuckers, pirate perch, fat-headed minnows, bridled madtoms, quillback chubsuckers - pickled for all eternity - I decided it was all too much. And not enough. I was losing my taste for this. I wished to just draw these creatures, without quantifying or mapping their distributions; I wished to leave their mysteries intact, without killing them in an attempt to understand their lives.

Simultaneously, I was making money conducting an environmental impact study – counting birds and monitoring population cycles near a nuclear power plant. I became increasingly alarmed as I sensed my joy in bird watching begin to wither. Somewhere from deep inside came a warning signal. I started probing around at how the data from this study I had inherited were being analyzed, and soon discerned that the entire rigmarole was designed so as not to generate statistically significant results: the background variability in the study area was so great as to mask any changes in bird populations, short of an outright catastrophe.  I saw that, to support my schooling, I was accepting conscience money from the power company. The study was nearly meaningless (perhaps worse than meaningless because it purported to be worthwhile), and thus, by taking their money, I was participating in something very wrong: if not outright eco-terrorism then at least ecological sabotage. Were there other biologists like myself, studiously recording how many wrens hatched every year near the Chernobyl reactor - fiddling away, while Rome burned?  How many other studies like this one, masquerading under the cloak of science, were out there?

Meanwhile, back in the academic art encampment, while some critics were still redefining modernism and post-modernism, others were already proclaiming the precise event that signaled the death knell of post-modernism. Myself, I was more concerned with teasing apart the many layers of what constituted me – in an attempt to discover what it was my soul so insistently demanded of me. As any youth in chrysalis, or in crisis, could tell you, my internal contradictions were real conflicts. I was deadlocked on an internal battlefield. Frustrated by what I perceived as the limitations of my professors and the over-simplified reductionist logic of many around me, I still placed untoward value on academic degrees and credentials, and deferred to the authority of others.  While secretly decrying a cold intellectualized world that could sacrifice the health of ecosystems for short-term economic gain or military adventurism, I also savored the intellectual chess games and fieldwork of science, the speculating on elegant solutions to questions of systematics, taxonomy and evolution.  

It all came to a head one morning in my Colorado apartment when, throwing a passing glance into the mirror to check on the man who had always patiently resided there (waiting to assure me that I was still I). I found that a stranger was staring back at me: I was aghast; I was becoming that with which I filled my days. 

As far as my art making was concerned, I was, by then, looking at a future as a ‘Sunday painter’ – my passion reduced to a quaint hobby, at best. I was also in danger of becoming a cynic as I saw my idealistic fellow scientists graduate and become “rabbit cops” (game wardens chasing poachers) or, worse yet, those assigned to facilitate the delivery of timber sales from the national forest into the hands of the global timber magnates - identifying the top grade lumber, while plotting out the best paths for the logging-roads to go in. Nobody seemed to be asking these well-trained scientists where logging should take place from the standpoint of environmental health, if timber sales should be proceeding at the same frenetic pace and at fire-sale prices – or if the massive clear cutting should be conducted at all.

Was it a mistake that I stared back for so long that fateful morning?  I knew then that it was all coming to an end.  It took me some sleepless nights of tormented writhing in bed to arrive at full acceptance of where my life was heading, but eventually the agonies of indecision subsided, and towards morning, on a very concrete day, something shifted deep within – something tectonic with the finality of volcanoes forming and geologic fault-lines shifting.  I knew. And there was no turning back

I had actually encountered my first etching plate years ago when as an undergrad I had taken an art class on the side of the biology curriculum. I was going to broaden my horizons a bit, and instead it turned into an awakening. I remember I fell in love with the subtleties of line and tonality that could be achieved with an etched copper plate. So this is what I had been born to do. This is why I had been maniacally drawing for so many years: it was to be ready for the copper plate - no longer hindered by tentative and awkward draftsmanship. Dutifully pursuing zoology, I had repressed this knowledge for years; now it reared its head again and bit me. The sweet venom was in my blood - till death do us part.

Twelve months later I found myself leaning over a nitric acid bath in the bowels of the art department at Western Michigan University - on my way to earning a Master of Fine Arts degree as a printmaker. Immersed in an even more caustic substance – the abstruse literature of art criticism and the acerbic discussions with other aspiring practitioners, my fellow students the conceptualists and post-modernists - I learned the lingo and could indeed ‘pass’. But I caught myself looking back over my shoulder at artist/naturalists, at the folk art created by peoples still living an ancestral heritage, and even further beyond - to images that had been brought to light in Neolithic caves.  The contradiction here was amusing, for I valued the array of freedoms, the vast panoply of technical expression available to the artist of the late twentieth century, yet I felt myself emotionally to be a primitive – albeit a primitive with a computer and academic degrees.

Art would never be an intellectual pursuit for me.  It would be a profound visual event, a supernatural episode of the heart. It would derive its power from deeply felt emotional responses to a highly charged and soulful world. I discovered that what motivated me were the primal ways of apprehending reality. Art for me would be a consciously atavistic activity – an impulse equally available to the professor as to the preliterate hunter-gatherer. The term atavism is most often used in a biological context and refers to the reappearance of remote ancestral characteristics in a plant or animal that have been absent in intervening generations – a throwback to the past. It can also refer to behavior that is a product of impulses long suppressed by society’s rules.  The word’s origins? (Funny that, looking up the etymological origins of atavism - a lot like finding synonyms for Thesaurus).  Atavistic derives from the Latin atavus: a remote ancestor - and is composed of the roots at (father) and avus (grandfather) - forefather.

I was determined to go home - home to the domain of my forefathers. This journey, homeward-bound, has led me from the Great Lakes habitats of the extinct Michigan grayling to the hermitages of monks in Tibet, from the dwellings of the dead in Mayan burial caverns in Belize to the honored abodes of sacred trees and groves in Latvia, deep into the residences of northern white cedars and the thunder beings along Lake Superior’s shores and high into the Sierras that house the most ancient trees of all – the bristle-cone pines, and back across the ocean to the native lands of my ancestors in Bohemia, where I lay silently under a heritage linden while it marked the passage of the sun overhead -  the rays penetrating deep into its arboreal body.

During my search for the origin, the source, the starting point or first cause – the neolithic artist deep inside the earth tracing the outline of his hand - I desired to leave a record of life. And life implies death. Not just the stock romanticized visions of death; of bears eating salmon along picturesque mountain streams or the nature documentaries featuring lions taking down gazelles, broadcast to viewers secure on their couch at home - but the death that is the result of ill-conceived wars, of pestilence, of the ticking time bomb of catastrophic industrial accidents waiting to happen.  All the flora and fauna and avian populations gone in a flash – displaced, poisoned, vaporized. Of course it bothers me; it positively alarms me; you bet there is a dark shadow-side to some of my art – work made with the inescapable gun of human fallibility at my head.

I cry out in my sleep at night – terrified by visions of industrial logging operations with their chainsaws screaming in the forest, by the landslide of genocides and extinctions produced by the hand of man.  But volcanoes and comets too periodically devastate continents. Complete biological kingdoms disappear from the fossil record at random intervals; rare and fragile creatures that had survived millions of years in precarious environments. Are all lives, great and small – extraordinary, as they may be - expendable? I toss and turn.  Where is my loving, all forgiving God in all of this? I am only a human, a fragile beast with a brittle skull in which lies a brilliant mind that has evolved the capacity for rarified thought - capable of functioning only in the narrowest of temperature ranges and biochemical constancy. And in that brain it’s all a hodgepodge of creatures eating and being eaten; nutrients being recycled; Bach sonatas; Smetana’s quartets; crickets chirping in the night in the grandest symphony of all; every fiddlehead and spider web exquisitely formed and enfolding microcosms of perfection and beauty, multiplying endlessly under magnification; generations and incarnations cycle in eternity; chances; missteps; the sum of all voices of all grace saving humanity; sources of hope. Hope…

At the bottom of Pandora’s box – Hope, the last to come out after the flood of agonies, plagues and wailing banshees. That last gift: was it the final and most cruel punishment of all; the delusion that allows us to begin anew and keep experiencing the betrayals and plagues afresh? Is it just a horrid reversal of the principle that habituation reduces the strength of all sensations - of pain as well? I cast my counter spell. I hope against hope. I cast my lot with the cycles of nature  – in regeneration and transformation, in the fawn teetering on newly stretched legs, in the sassafras shoots breaking through a parking lot to greet the sun, in human children going forth to meet their destiny in the cosmic crap-shoot.

When I am dead and when every molecule of my drawings has recycled, what will have been the purpose of that child I once was – the child who so long ago once used the underbelly of the kitchen table as his Sistine Chapel. Would he still have wished to become me? One summer afternoon, a chance meeting in a café put my doubts to rest.

I had been commissioned to draw lithographs for The Snowy Egret, a Mid-western magazine whose visionary editor, Carl Barnebey, fills its pages with artwork, poetry and ruminations on nature. Carl also prints the magazine’s artwork from original woodblocks and litho-plates; the magazine’s entire run directly from artist’s plates - no photo-transfers - much as periodicals were printed a century ago! While working on The Snowy Egret commission, when cabin fever set in at the studio, I began to carry around a stack of aluminum litho-plates to the various cafes I infest. I sat clutching my bundle like a bag lady with her prized few possessions, sipping coffee and drawing egrets for hours: playing, experimenting, manipulating their forms, twisting birds into cedar roots metamorphosing into rib cages transforming into minnows mutating into tadpoles. I just drew and drew and redrew the necks of egrets coiling in and back upon themselves in repeating serpentine curves. (Was it the quadruple espresso?)                                                                                                

Never having the time to read the magazines that stuff my mailbox, in cafés I go straight for the glossies filled with info - some of it idiotically puerile, some awe-inspiring - about what goes on in those parts of society with which I otherwise have little or no intercourse. Flipping pages, I spotted some exquisite drawing: before me lay the magnificent walls of the Chauvet Pont d’arc Cave in southern France, its entrance just recently unveiled by curious spelunkers. The techno-pop music ceased grating on my nerves. The surrounding conversations, the gossip of the town, ordinarily so piquant, became just background din, a flock of sparrows. The dust of the ancients settled upon my brow in that polished marble and steel cafe, triggering recognition and revelation: I had just met a kindred soul across the vast chasm of time.

There on the page was a drawing executed 27 thousand years ago: drawn with the identical level of fascination with which I had just been drawing and redrawing egret throats. The trance I had been in was clearly echoed in the rhinoceros horn drawn repeatedly, over and over again, on the cave wall: the artist, visibly in love with the line going down on the cave wall, relished the physical act of drawing, the playing with the stylization of bison, reindeer, lynx and horses - just as I had been moved to play with egrets, dace and bluegills; old familiar friends who whisper to me at streamside, call to me from subterranean places deeper than sleep, from dreamtime, from the time of emergence – and ask to be regenerated, rebirthed, reformed and restored.

Egret fantasy (1996)  
IMAGE MISSING
Reprinted from The Snowy Egret
Lithograph    11” x 17”

Time was meaningless. Here it was - my artistic movement, my lineage. Here they were – my atavus, my grandfathers, my forefathers: the cave painters. They spoke to me. Directly across the millennia. Their art indicates that they invoked fertility, successful hunts, the survival of their own – but it had also found form in euphoric moments when they willingly gave themselves over to the muse. Their art - accomplished with intent, fervently, by torchlight, deep in caverns where far greater dangers than marauding art critics lurked in the deeper recesses – had been worth dying for. 

All thoughts of contemporary post-something-or-other-isms went flying.  This was real as rain. I might not get far with the advocacy of art as religious expression best performed naked in a cave, but our need for the sacred and ritualistic and ceremonial aspects of life are real. We are in no way discharged from responsibility by pretending to have outgrown those primal artists and their purpose; by renouncing respectful entreaties for a good harvest from the Great Mother, instead throwing pesticides in Her face; by believing that what artists create is mere decorative surface or intellectual swordplay.

Chuavet  Pont d’Arc Cave:  Southern France
IMAGE MISSING
Anonymous artist       (25,000 BC)

I suggest that, depending upon the dictates of book design we include one, none or several cave art pieces here – at least one from Chauvet, but other more famous ones from Altamira or Lascaux would be OK.

Leaning over the drawings of hooves, wattles and antlers - all accurately depicted - I imagined their shamans – those who see in the dark, in the language of the Siberian Tungus people – there on the ice-age grasslands of southern France, examining wolf-kills as I might study road-kill or sketch the spawned and dying salmon swirling helplessly in an eddy. They would understand my fascination with bowfin (dogfish throughout the Midwest) awakening each year with the spring equinox as the fish come into weedy shallows to generate offspring. The brilliant purple and green spawning colors, with an ‘eye’ at the base of the tail, call out for recognition.  Like turtles, lamprey and squid, these modern fish are nearly indistinguishable from their fossilized ancestors.  So adaptable are they to changing environments that they have barely changed since the Devonian era 500 million years ago. Was my soul like the dogfish – barely changed over 500 million years? The cave painters are here with me, or am I there with them - marveling at the ‘eyespots’, the emblem of regeneration for the bowfin clan, as it reappears in conjunction with portents from the heavens, foretelling the return of the sun and the coming fecundity.

Bowfin, Native American Lungfish: Eye of Horus  (1995)
IMAGE MISSING
Drawing over Monotinted paper    12” x 18

I probe the edges of consciousness during artistic reverie and poach images there. I encounter more than I expect. I awake. In a dimension where everything is alive, meaningful and communicates, I speak to the non-human and they answer. I become circumspect in what I claim to know. I am a concerned citizen like all others, worried about property taxes and insurance rates, pension funds, social security, terrorists, wiretaps, civil liberties, creeping inflation, surveillance cameras, sky-rocketing unemployment, computer viruses, building codes, speed traps, hip-hop music, intellectuals who don’t vote, computerized voting machines that do, world peace, a piece of the pie, terrorists under my bed, red-baiting, who will win on American Idol, the bird-flu quarantine in Bucharest, the fairness of school busing, the dark side of affirmative action, the proliferation of coat hangers in dark closets, any and all conspiracies - but in the studio, after the telemarketers have gone to bed, I still know that freedom and joy reside in those places of serenity and shadow where few others tread.

I wish to constitute an avante guard of one. I wish to explore the dreamworld. I wish to diligently investigate visions. I wish to be a reconnaissance mission with one volunteer, sent out by myself, like the old Ronin myth of the lone Japanese samurai, I wish to be a warrior without master, wandering the landscape with my ethics and skills and codes of honor intact. And I wish to act on my own -  spotting traps, probing and surveying foreign territory in advance of the main corps. I wish to travel lightly and respond immediately – the sketch sometimes grabbed in seconds – the insight captured while in full retreat.  The frontier where freedom and beauty reside is a risky place, requiring nimble reflexes.  I sally forth and actively look for what might be found, but, in truth, the moment of awakening, when it crosses my path usually occurrs where I did not expect to encounter it and at a time of its own choosing.  It can happen while fishing or drawing, but it can also intrude itself as simply as having a kestrel hit my windowpane.

A messenger from across the species divide is suddenly lying there before me – stunned and quivering, a brilliantly colored little falcon with stiletto-talons.  Like the Neolithic artist descending underground with satchels of tallow and red ochre, I seize the moment and, taking up my implements, engage the experience of kestrel.  My day is changed in a heartbeat as I drop the letter to another disinterested congressman and begin to define the contour of that falcon beak, wondering how many times this perfect instrument has punctured the brain case of some attractive songbird.

Kestrel   2004
IMAGE MISSING
Drawing on asphaltum-stained paper   8” x 20

I welcome the muse as I encounter it.  Camping would seem the perfect situation - far from distractions and telephones - and oftentimes I do, indeed, lug around the pounds of copper plates and pads of paper ready to work. At times I do good work, and yet often I enter the fold of all that I hold dear and am not moved to depict the grandeur of the Rocky Mountains.  Instead, I am moved in ways which produce no work, but which set the stage for something else – something more occurs when I have made the space for its appearance in my life.

I once walked into the heart of the Montana’s Bob Marshal Wilderness, laden with supplies for several weeks. My companion was Jaroslav Fišer, an actor from Prague’s Theater of the Balustrade (Vaclav Havel’s home theater). The Iron Curtain had come down, and Jaroslav was brimming with all the bottled up desire to see the world – it was to be the wild west.  I engineered a memorable trip to a place with grizzly bears and mountain lions, animals that could eat us, an adventure conducive to staying alert and observant. We went up through the Scapegoat Wilderness to come out across the Bitterroot divide and down into the Valley of the upper Flathead River  - a watershed that is still home to now rare bull trout and a native strain of cutthroat trout.  These dramatically colored indigenous fish harbor an increasingly rare gene pool, undiluted by exotic introductions. Massive spawning bull trout were running up into the small tributaries from reservoirs on the lower Flathead and dominating the larger pools. Exquisite cut-throats were in every little pool, under every undercut. Mountain whitefish schooled in the deeper pools.  It was indeed a magic-land for one with a fly rod and appreciation of fish.

For weeks we hiked the Flathead basin and its tributaries. I hardly drew at all. And then the weather turned - frost in the morning and a dusting of snow on the mountain passes.  It was time to go home.  We clambered up over the Bitterroot Divide and dropped down the China Wall, descending into the rain shadow of the eastern Front Range along the upper Sun River - just south of the Blackfoot reservation. We had walked for weeks past ridges where late-summer fires burned unchecked, acclimating to a different rhythm of life, paying constant attention in that unfocused way that evolves in the vicinity of large predators and forest fires.  Hiking had become a moving meditation.  One day we ate trout, the next, it was mushrooms or whitefish.  In that opportunistic disposition, I spotted a grouse - low down in a spruce, and looking, for all the world, like a meal. I picked up a rock and threw it. I missed, picked up another rock and missed again. The bird would just duck or lift a foot to let the rocks sail by.  I soon got a sore arm from all the missiles I was hurling past the grouse, and still it wouldn’t fly away.  Crazy bird!  I kept at it with a single-minded fervor.  By now I saw the grouse as a gift from above - a willing sacrifice, if I would only hold up my end of the agreement and hit it.   When I did eventually hit the bird, it dropped dead on the spot: no wounded flopping bird to chase, no messy killing – just a peculiar series of events. 

We pitched camp immediately, and I set to work on the bird. Paying respects to the grouse for its self-sacrifice, I began to pluck and gut it.  From somewhere deep inside the soft delicate bird in my hand, I began to feel a pulsing; within minutes, the sensation – internal, and echoing my heartbeat - became more insistent and became externally audible. Me? I just kept plucking; snapped off the wing tips, cut out the gizzard and opened up the body cavity. The throbbing sound grew to a drumbeat, and then a second drum joined in with my pounding heart, and then a third.  Then voices chimed in – human voices – but not voices of the present day: the songs of the ancients were accompanying my preparations, blessing my journey and the meal. It dawned on me - they were Blackfoot voices. The wailing and chanting and singing of Blackfoot drummers and singers, now at full volume, inside my head and all around, suffused the camp with sacred sound. When the bird was plucked and stuffed with wild leeks and mushrooms and ready to go in the fire, the voices and drums faded away again to nothing more than the wind in the pines.  A blessing had been bestowed – to take back to the studio and remember when it is time to entreat the spirits to guide my hand.

Alright already, I agree: I will accept the calling – even dare to call myself a neoprimitive; Taking on this vocation will mean being the guy with whom the world is out of step. I suppose I’m already most of the way there anyway – just accepting the inevitable.  I will accept my spiritual obligation to act as a counterweight to the dominant global trends that lead us to an impoverished and predictable world of commodities and transactions. Knowledge is revealed for a purpose and implies obligations. The first of the crucial obligations I will fulfill is to simply honor myself and my gifts by applying them – now and not at some eternally distant time; when it is convenient; when I can afford it; when I have the right studio; proper equipment; adequate free time; a grant or permission. That in itself is a revolutionary act of breaking out from the mold and of inestimable value.

The second function of my newly unearthed primitivism will be to become a co-creator of diversity. Here I will allow my background as naturalist, to come into play.  The child who insists on adding yet another specimen to its box of seashells and the butterfly collector enamored of the shimmering diversity in her insect collection both know intuitively what the zoologist knows empirically: that in all complex systems - ecological, technical or social - their diversity is the selling point - the critical attribute that saves them in times of crisis. Seemingly unimportant mutations that have not appeared adaptive up to that moment, in an emergency suddenly become critical agents for survival. A genetic monoculture may appear strong and vital under a certain set of stable environmental circumstances, but these very similar individuals from a narrow genetic base are also more likely to all die of the same epidemic disease or the same environmental catastrophe.  Mutant genes - for adaptation to new temperature regimes or to biochemical stresses or bacterial infection - appear to be genetic redundancy and their importance is not evident as a critical survival strategy – not until calamity strikes.

When human cultures experience perturbations of their systems that change the equation defining life and death, they also need sudden adaptive strategies for survival. Artists and those other odd ducks out there tilting at windmills and marching to the beat of their own drummers – those who don’t get with the program or do things on which others see value fulfill this need in society - as a group, assume a social role resembling an ecological niche filled by organisms whose genetic utility is not immediately evident. Artists perform the ostensibly impractical work of creating the diversity that flies in the face of market driven efficiencies and globalized uniformity. The human heritage grows and is enriched because artists care enough to continually reinvent it and invest it with new form - a gift of no small consequence, for it is in the diversity of sensual experience and creative expression that our collective joy and salvation lie.

The last crucial function of my neo-primitivism is to respond to the voices calling out to me from across the divide - those barely perceptible invitations to explore the depths of inner space and mine the dreamworld. Dimly discerned feelings; partially remembered past lives; perceptions barely noted in a peripheral second sight; recurring dreams; apparitions sometimes gone as soon as they register - they form me as much as do conscious memories and the books I’ve read and forgotten. A worldview is no less real if its building blocks are not all lucidly remembered and footnoted. Here dwells the oracle.

I dare not lose sight of that child - that child that once was me, when I faced creation with nothing but a crayon in hand - nor of the youth that he grew into, bewildered, late-blooming, inebriated by the spectrum of visual experience. I was unencumbered and impeccable then – the source of my desire pure. When I draw skeletal fish returning by moonlight to the streams of their birth, I have seen the sense in coming full circle. When I draw what I have seen, I cast my spell and speak my prayer and differ naught from my spiritual progenitors - the primitives.